Boosting unstable particles
| Autor: | Gavassino, L., Giacosa, F. |
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| Rok vydání: | 2022 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Phys. Rev. A 106, 042215, Published 20 October 2022 |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| DOI: | 10.1103/PhysRevA.106.042215 |
| Popis: | In relativity, there is no absolute notion of simultaneity, because two clocks that are in different places can always be desynchronized by a Lorentz boost. Here, we explore the implications of this effect for the quantum theory of unstable particles. We show that, when a wavefunction is boosted, its tails travel one to the past and the other to the future. As a consequence, in the new frame of reference, the particle is in a quantum superposition "decayed + non decayed", where the property "decayed-ness" is entangled with the position. Since a particle cannot be localised in a region smaller than the Compton wavelength, there is a non-zero lower bound on this effect, which is fundamental in nature. The surprising implication is that, in a quantum world, decay probabilities can never be Lorentz-invariant. We show that this insight was the missing ingredient to reconcile the seemingly conflicting views about time dilation in relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. Comment: 13 pages, 4 captioned figures, published on PRA, see https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.106.042215 |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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